Canton of Lucerne

The Canton of Lucerne is a canton of central Switzerland. Lucerne, its capital, has been known for being Catholicism's greatest stonghold in the country, and an aristocratic oligarchy ruled Lucerne from the 15th century until 1798, surviving a bloody peasant war in 1653. In 1798, the French Revolutionary Army took Lucerne and made the city the seat of the central government of the Helvetic Republic, becoming one of six directorial cantons under the First French Empire from 1803 to 1815. In 1831, the cantonal constitution swept away the patrician government, and the Sonderbund War of 1847 would see the government defeat the resurgent conservatives after they regained power in Lucerne. In 2015, Lucerne had a population of 398,762 people.